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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



naturally become expert in all the arts 

 and artifices of word-manipulation. Un- 

 der such a system the letter of the law 

 will tend to take the place of the spirit 

 and purpose of the law. In these cir- 

 cumstances there will arise the habit, 

 both on the part of lawyers and of 

 citizens, of reverencing the forms of 

 law more than the principles which lie 

 behind them. The purposes by which 

 all legislation should be animated and 

 determined will come to be habitually 

 overlooked. Questions of right and 

 justice will be ruled out as irrelevant, 

 the highest and only solicitude being as 

 to the binding phraseology of specific 

 clauses. In this way the whole appara- 

 tus of justice may be perverted to the 

 work of stifling the national conscience, 

 and the real purposes of government 

 defeated by its own agencies. There 

 are various exemplifications of this, to 

 wdiich it may be well to call attention. 

 The London "Economist," when 

 some time ago discussing the privateer- 

 ing question with reference to England, 

 Eussia, and America, recognized the 

 point here made, by stating that the 

 United States may be expected to fulfill 

 its treaty stipulations, but that it will 

 do so from a lawyer's point of view as 

 to their meaning and obligation. It 

 says : " The Government of the United 

 States is not a dishonest Government, 

 or even a tricky Government, widely as 

 that impression is diffused. Owing to 

 circumstances upon which it is unne- 

 cessary here to enter, it is a Govern- 

 ment very much in the hands of lawyers, 

 and of lawyers trained to encounter one 

 another by means of the quibbles, de- 

 vices, and ' sharp ' interpretations of law 

 which a generation ago were so much 

 in vogue among ourselves. Such men 

 are very apt to read contracts strictly, 

 to seek loop-holes when clauses in those 

 contracts are inconvenient, and to sug- 

 gest interpretations which give them an 

 apparent advantage, and this practice 

 undoubtedly annoys foreign diploma- 

 tists, who do their little trickeries in a 



different and, as they think, a more 

 gentlemanly way. But the same train- 

 ing inspires in the American party- 

 leaders a great respect for law itself, 

 and especially for written law, great 

 acuteness in interpreting it, and a great 

 reluctance to see it neglected, and they 

 are no more likely to break or evade 

 unmistakable rules than English judges 

 are." 



The treatment of the slave question 

 in England and the United States well 

 illustrates the diverse working of their 

 constitutions. It was by a recognition 

 of the predominance of the spirit of the 

 English Constitution that Chief- Justice 

 Holt was led, early in the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, to decide that " as soon as a negro 

 slave comes into England he is free." 

 This decision, after being long resisted, 

 was reaffirmed by Lord Mansfield in 

 1772 in the celebrated case of Somer- 

 set. These decisions settled the prin- 

 ciple that the English Constitution was 

 adverse to slavery. But of that cele- 

 brated jurist and eminent legal reform- 

 er, Lord Mansfield, it has been remarked 

 that "his eagerness to discourage tech- 

 nicalities and his preference of the 

 principles of civil law occasionally led 

 him to make the law instead of ex- 

 pounding it." This, however, is the 

 American view of the American biog- 

 rapher who forgot the constitution- 

 making function of the English judge. 

 Both Holt and Mansfield, in their great 

 decisions, simply fell back upon the 

 principles of natural justice, which they 

 assumed it to be the supreme object of 

 the English Constitution to secure ; and, 

 it being established forever that "a 

 slave can not breathe in England," the 

 policy of hostility to slavery became 

 national, and was carried out in the 

 gradual and pacific emancipation of all 

 slaves in the British dependencies. The 

 struggle was long and the progress slow, 

 but the result was a triumph of the 

 principles of right over the selfishness 

 and greed that were legally embodied 

 in the slave system. 



